Flexibility Fallacy Follow-up (Part 1)
Is flexibility tool for gender equality or financial maximization?
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If you have newsletter overload, set your š s on the four gifs and Parting Words. Youāll get the answer to todayās focus: Is flexibility a tool for gender equality or financial maximization?
The Opening Spiel
I want to continue talking about the flexibility fallacy and how when applied to just some, and not all workers, it is not a solution to the workplace gender gap.
I wrote an Op-Ed in the Globe & Mail about this last week. I basically wrote that flexibility is a sham. It keeps primary care givers (mainly women) from rising to the senior ranks while also maintains the status quo of them juggling the overwhelming load of work and home life.
I had to leave out some richness, nuance and complexity of the topic. Thank goodness for Substackās limitless word count and freedom from editors. š
This week I want to go back to where flexibility originated from. Yes - Iām *that* monkey who questions why we donāt eat the bananas hanging right in front of us. šµ (Side note: if you got the reference - apparently itās a made up science experiment. If you donāt get the reference - check out the link to learn the parable of why us humans donāt question norms or rules).Ā
Anywho, in the case of workplace flexibility policies - wow - this is a doozy of an origin story.
What unfolds from here is the drama of post-WWII Germany and how workplace flexibility policies came to be.
Scene 1: A dark time in post-war Germany, 1945 to 1951
When you wage war on the whole world and then lose, it doesnāt take any stretch of imagination to conjure what life would be like for Germans. And yet, the Allies made economic matters even worse by systematically reducing and managing Germanyās economy.
They went beyond dismantling the factories equipped for bombs, guns, tanks etc. Half of Germanyās 1,500 manufacturing plants were demolished. Steel production was limited to 25% of pre-war levels. Car production fell to 10% of pre-war levels. The Allies exported Germanyās coal at one third the normal price, making Germany lose $200 million from this measure alone.
Food was also desperately scarce as Germany was cut out of agriculture trade (and lost the ability to expropriate food from occupied lands). This led to mass starvation. The average German only ate between 1,000 to 1,500 calories a day in the late 40s.
The Allies went after the intangibles too, confiscating German intellectual property. The US encouraged itās own companies to access information and it is estimated they gained $10 billion value from āintellectual repatriationsā.Ā
Finally, there was massive social upheaval. POWs were returning and East Germans were fleeing Soviet rule en masse. Not to mention to emotional turmoil a country must go through after waging such a brutal war and massacre of millions of people.
Nicht gut fĆ¼r die Deutschen.
Scene 2: 1950s Wirtschaftswunder (aka "economic miracleā)
In the peak of summer 1949, Germany essentially waved the white flag and called āuncle!ā.
Konrad Adenauer, the head of the government at that time, wrote a letter to the French President asking them to stop the dismantling. (Itās worth reading that letter to see how someone who is essentially a President would word the message of āDude, please stop systematically decimating my countryā.)
The Allies let up, brought them into the Marshal Plan and the economic recovery began.
This wasnāt your average recovery though. This era was called a Wirtschaftswunder - an āeconomic miracleā! GDP grew an average of 8% per year, completely outpacing France, United States, United Kingdom, and Italy (i.e., those that kicked German in the butt the previous five years).
There are various theories on the source of growth. Contributors to growth include the introduction of the Deutsche Mark as the new currency, Korean War causing a demand for goods (including German firearms the Allies apparently stopped them from producing five years earlier š¤¦āāļø) and the shift from peasant farming to industrial manufacturing.
Another major source of growth were the 3.5 million East Germans - many of them skilled labourers, professionals and intellectuals - who fled Soviet occupation. That growth of employee labour hours gave a nice boost to the countryās GDP (table 1 and 5).
The good bit is that industry was humming so these people had a place to work. By the end of the 1950s, unemployment was plummeting and bottomed out at 0.19%. Practically every single person who wanted a job had one. Thatās unheard of in todayās economy!
Scene 3: 1960s slow down - help wanted!
As Germany entered the second decade of growth, it was hard to keep up the pace.
One change in particular that contributed to the economic lethargy was a drop in labour supply. The Soviets built the Berlin Wall in 1961 prohibiting East Germans from escaping to the West. They said it was to āprotect their citizens from the pernicious influence of decadent capitalist cultureā.
At the same time, the Berlin Wall completely turned off the labour growth taps. What was once a rush of millions of East Germans escaping communism settled into a very slow drip of tens of thousands each year.
What were these ādecadent capitalistsā to do without more people to work in their growing factories?!
Insert Christel Krammerer, a management consultant, who in 1965 came up with the idea of flexibility. She looked to women as the next source of labour. She suggested they could choose their start and finish time so long as they did the contracted hours. This way women could contribute to the labour market and maintain their housework (lucky us!).Ā Ā
It was a smart idea at the time because less than half of the female Germans were āeconomically activeā. (The fact that home and caregiving unpaid work isnāt considered a contributor to the economy is an issue unto itself, but I digress). There were 10 million warm bodies to still tap! Thatās 3x the amount of East Germans that escaped into West Germany in the 1950s. Letās get them to work!
But the policy didnāt take hold for women. Female participation in the workforce didnāt pick up until the 80s and 90s.
A German company did, however, pick up Krammererās idea for their mostly male workforce. In 1967, Messerschmitt-Bƶlkow-Blohm, an aerospace manufacturer, realized their 3,000 employees were all trying to arrive and leave at the same time which caused mega traffic issues, tardiness and of course, productivity loss! A solution must be found to productivity loss! So they introduced "Gliding timeā, in which they allowed employees to arrive and leave at staggered intervals to avoid traffic jams.
Traffic. Productivity. Economic growth. Thatās the reason flexibility entered our workplace. Not gender equality and female justice.
If all you have is a hammerā¦ Put it down and find a new tool!
Fast forward to today, 85% of companies have flexible work policies. This is considered one of the main āfamily-friendlyā benefits cited by the Canadaās Top 100 Companies list.
Companies also use it for other groups, like folks that need to care for their mental health or, like the German aerospace workers in 1967, avoid rush hour.
It makes me think of Abraham Maslowās law of the instrument cognitive bias. Once we have a tool (ahem, flexibility) we become over-reliant on it and use it to solve all kinds of issues. But as we know, flexibility not only doesnāt solve the issue of gender equality in the workplace, it in fact keeps caregivers, who are primarily women, in the lower ranks.
Parting words
Flexibility programs didnāt originate as a source of employee support. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Flexibility for women in the workplace was a method of financial maximization during an economic slowdown.Ā It was meant to bring in a fresh labour pool when unemployment was just 0.19%.
This policy has largely stayed the same but is now meant to be fixing a completely different problem.
Abraham Maslow put it best when he wrote in 1966: āI suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nailā.
It might be time to put down the hammer and pick up a new tool to achieve gender diversity in the workplace.
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š Thank you to Jon, Amanda and Dan for the input in this and previous versions.
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